me to the minds of rulers the
cogent necessity of becoming reformers or of vanishing, Capponi was
made a councillor of state, and at the close of that year was employed
by the grand duke to draw up a scheme of representative institutions
for Tuscany. To give anything approaching to a complete account of
Capponi's activity during the troubled period which followed would
be to write the history of Tuscany during that period. The general
progress of affairs was precisely that which history has had so often
to recount. The sovereign, frightened, obstinate, and little able to
appreciate the forces opposed to him, was wavering, fickle, timid,
yet stubborn, and, above all, untrustworthy. The people were bent on
pushing matters to extremes to which those who had so far been their
leaders were unwilling to go, and, as usual, the best of those leaders
were shunted from the road, happy if they were able, as Capponi was,
to retire in safety to the tranquil seclusion of studious life.
When, after the flight of the grand duke from his dominions and his
subsequent restoration by Austrian bayonets, a regular government was
once more established in Florence, Capponi was constant, though wholly
unconnected with public life officially, in tendering counsel to the
grand duke which, had it been listened to, might have saved his throne
and changed all the future of Italy. But he was disregarded, and even
suspected; and, as we all know, the end came in the memorable 1859.
After the union of Italy under Victor Emmanuel, Capponi was at once
named a senator and decorated with all the honors the sovereign had
to bestow. But, alas! they were bestowed on a blind old man, whose
misfortune incapacitated him from taking any part in public life. From
the time when the Italian revolution was consummated the life of Gino
Capponi was that of a retired and laborious student. The loss of his
sight by no means involved in his case the abandonment of literary
labor; and his last great work, published but a year or two ago,
the _History of the Republic of Florence_, is the _second_ great
historical work which in our own time has been produced by an author
deprived of eyesight.

Capponi began his literary life at twenty by the publication in 1812
of _Observations on a Critical Examination of Amerigo Vespucci's
First Voyage to the New World_: he ended it, as has been said, by the
publication at eighty of his Florentine _History_. To give even the
titles of all